Pushing Back the Walls: The Politics of Maneuver in Women’s Drug Rehabilitation

Abstract

This article uses participant-observation research from the women’s floor of a residential drug treatment program in Queens, NYC to explore how rehabilitative institutions instantiate and extend carceral geographies, practices, and design, despite their asserted “alternative to incarceration” status. Focusing on two aspects of rehabilitation architecture — routinization/orderliness and therapeutic quarantine/containment — I show how the spatial politics of rehabilitation enforce drug use as a pathological, criminological problem of racialized-gendered deviance that must be corrected through isolation, “habilitation,” and punitive discipline. Against these violent constructions, criminalized women who use drugs experimented with ways of being for themselves and each other that moved against how the rehab attempted to contain, sever, and reorient their desires. Using the examples of sleep, bodily adornment, and bedroom décor, I argue that criminalized women intervened in, commented on, and sometimes resisted carceral spatial practices of rehabilitation.

Introduction: In the Shadow of Jail

“Back in the day, over there at Daytop, if you were on punishment, baybee, they used to make you sweep away the sun,” cackled Shannon,¹ throwing her head back and laughing into the florescent cafeteria lights, her faded pink-growing-in-to-dusky-blond hair cascading over the back of the creaky plastic chair on which she perched, arms encircling thin, white legs drawn up to her narrow shoulders. “Sweep away the sun?” I asked, unfamiliar with the term. “They’d send you up on the rooftop at the crack-of-dawn — hell, before the crack, when the sky is just getting light, but the sun isn’t on the horizon — and position you on the east side of the bare roof with a broom. As the sun came up over the buildings and started to hit, you’d stand at that border and ‘sweep’ the sunlight into the shadow.” “If that’s rehab,” I mused, “what’s punishment?” Shannon shrugged, “It’s all about breaking you down so they can ‘build you back up,’ or so they say. I got all the breaking down, that’s for sure, but I never really did feel built back up. Maybe I never stuck around long enough to get to that part.” At the very moment that Shannon and I pondered the continuities between rehabilitation and punishment, New York City’s Mayor de Blasio was posturing as the leading light of progressive decarceration, promoting a set of liberal policies in which “alternatives to incarceration” programs — like Daytop, a residential treatment facility — played an outsized role. Yet, I was simultaneously learning from women like Shannon, who’d spent years in the forced circuit between jail and court-mandated drug treatment, that ideologies and practices of “rehabilitation” in New York City were inextricably bound up in geographies, institutions, and architectures of carceral punishment. From where we sat, “sweeping away the sun” was a paradigmatic case of punishment as space-making, and rehab as extending carceral space.

This piece is part of a broader forthcoming project exploring the race, gender, and class politics of court-coerced drug rehabilitation in New York City. Through ethnographic research in NYC drug courts — a drug treatment program in Queens whose client base was almost exclusively court mandated — archival research, and correspondence with incarcerated people, this project reveals how rehabilitation itself is at once a logic of confinement and of “white reconstruction” (Rodríguez 2021). Under these terms, the enclosure of criminalized people behind “reformed” institutional walls sometimes allows coercion to look like care (Cf. Davis 2006, Schept 2015; Kurti & Shanahan 2018; Ben-Moshe, 2020). Following scholars of prison “reform” under racial capitalism, drug criminalization not only produces a racialized surplus population available for dispossession, accumulation, and super-exploitation (Gilmore 2007, Haley 2016, Rodríguez 2020), but also sustains continual liberal reinvestment in the violent project of “civilizing” the social body. Understanding rehabilitation as a logic of state violence challenges the reformist fantasy that alternative programs into which people are coerced could ever be an “outside” to incarceration.

In this article, I use participant-observation research from the women’s floor of a residential drug treatment program in Queens to explore how rehabilitative institutions instantiate and extend carceral geographies, practices, and design, even as they are positioned as incarceration’s antithesis. From mid-2018 to the end of 2019, I spent approximately twenty hours per week on the women’s floor of Rising from the Ashes (a pseudonym), sitting in on group therapy sessions and speaking with residents during their downtime about their experiences in rehabilitation, drug court, and jail. Upon describing my project as exploring women’s oft-neglected experiences of drug criminalization and recovery, I received permission to conduct research from the directors of the facility and the women’s program. With this permission, I held several informal meetings with residents on the women’s floor, explaining my background in harm reduction, my own experiences of private residential psychiatric treatment as a young, white, middle-class gender nonconforming person, and my political commitments to drug user self-determination, healing justice, and abolition. I invited women to participate in my research and did not include the narratives of anyone who told me they did not want to contribute. This is not meant to override longstanding concern in feminist ethnography about the perils of falsely-presumed egalitarian relationships between ethnographers and interlocutors (Stacey 1988), but to note that the people whose analyses are represented here wanted to think together about what they were surviving, and if and how it could be changed.

Focusing the everydayness of carceral theories of design² — specifically therapeutic quarantine/containment and routinization/dullness — I show how the spatial politics of rehabilitation apprehend people who use drugs as pathological and criminal. Historians of the penitentiary and the asylum have revealed how central architecture was to theories of discipline and rehabilitation motivating early theorists and overseers of institutional space. For example, Mabel Wilson’s work reveals that ordinary practices of modern architecture (carceral and otherwise) embed ideologies of racial hierarchy in the “material conditions of modern life” (2020, 394). Following her intervention, I seek to show how the theory and practice of rehabilitation design white bourgeois normativity as paradigmatically civilized. Turning from the institutional design of rehabilitation, this paper further explores how criminalized women who used drugs experimented with ways of being for themselves and each other that pushed against the rehab’s walls. The embodied politics of rest and adornment index the small spaces of maneuver that women aggregated to themselves in their efforts to create and sustain visions of their histories, selves, and relationships that refuted the rehabilitative mandates of isolation, habilitation, and routine, and gestured towards visions of healing and recovery that exceeded white supremacist, classist, and heteropatriarchal versions of rehabilitation.

Walling In: Contagion, Quarantine, and the Politics of Safety

“Anyone who could afford to live there,” said Candace, gesturing out the 5^th floor window towards the new condo construction going up in garish yellow and green prefab slabs across the street, “isn’t going to pay for a view of a bunch of junkies in baby jail — I mean rehab.” Although new to the area — Candace was from upstate New York — she understood the urban spatial politics of “locally-unwanted-land-use” into which she had been mandated by drug court. Now, she was giving me the lay of the land. “Wadda you think will happen once the construction is finished?” I asked, pondering the horizon of gentrification augured by the construction. Candace shrugged, “When the time is right, they’ll sell this building and put us somewhere out of the way. They won’t want us going around the neighborhood on our group walks with a fricking chaperone like a bunch of misfit children, soiling the view.”

Back behind the public housing complex and the New York City sanitation truck depot, down five potholed blocks of warehouses and auto repair shops, and just-down-the-way from an electrical substation, the building stood, self-contained and turned away from the street, with a hidden side-entrance and a parking lot and fence acting as a barrier from the street. To the uninitiated, it would look like any other institution designed to “serve” (or contain) working class New Yorkers: a public health clinic perhaps, or a Human Resources Administration building, or parole office, or low-rise public housing. But to those in-the-know — the longtime drug user, perhaps, or the historian of rehabilitation — the five squat stories of dark red brick and narrow, grate-covered windows were home since the early 1980s to a satellite of New York City’s oldest residential drug treatment programs, Rising from the Ashes.

Now a sprawling national network of rehabilitation programs, Rising from the Ashes had humble beginnings in a crumbling walkup in the Upper West Side in the late-1960s, when, according to program lore, a group of people struggling with sobriety — demoralized and fed up with how neither incarceration nor detoxification had permanently transformed their relationships to substance use — banded together to fight for their collective sobriety. Incorporated into a nonprofit just as the national moral panic about illicit substance use was poised to take off, Rising from the Ashes copped contracts with the city’s newly-formed Addiction Services Agency and an NYC real estate empire to match, acquiring dilapidated properties across the five boroughs on the cheap, and using the unwaged labor of rehabilitation clients to rehab the buildings: “work as therapy.”² Walking up to Rising from the Ashes for the first time on a February morning in 2018, I took in a building condensing decades of the city’s carceral-therapeutic management of drug use as a “social problem.”

But I wasn’t expecting the building’s sheer ordinariness, its nondescript facade matched by tan interior walls, wax-colored linoleum tile floors, and steel grey doors lining residential halls, punctuated at regular intervals by neon-hued digital photographs of beaches and palms, tree-lined carriage roads, and sunsets over darkened mountains — technicolor nature against a backdrop of industrial beige. It took me a while to understand that the drabness of the building was part of the project of social engineering instantiated by the rehab’s close institutional cousins, the asylum, the jail, and the prison. The earliest architects of the prison and the asylum believed that “well-ordered” institutions that were “symmetrically arranged” and free of “corruptions” would “train the most notable victims of social disorder to discipline” (Rothman 1971, 107). “Ordered, routine activities counter the characteristically disordered lives of these clients,” as one of the foremost early theorists of residential drug treatment explained (de Leon 1997, 7). In order to bring “discipline” to those within its walls, Rising from the Ashes was benumbed and subdued, isolating those within its walls from the presumptively “chaotic” lifestyles that had brought clients to its doors.

Rising from the Ashes had, until recently, been what was called a therapeutic community (TC), a treatment modality conceptualized by its practitioners through the phrase “community as method.” Under this approach, “the drug abuse client [has] a social deficit and requir[es] social treatment” whereby social treatment is “an organized effort to resocialize the client, with the community as an agent of personal change” (Tims, Jainchill, & de Leon 1994, 2, emphasis added). Viewed as suffering from psychological deficits as well as deficits of socialization, the person who uses drugs must be reoriented and resocialized toward “right living” through participating in the social-, therapeutic-, domestic-, and labor-relations of the insular and ideologically rigid therapeutic community (de Leon 1997, 4–6). Conceptualized as threats to “right living,” the communities, environments, and social/familial relationships that people who use drugs came from were viewed as suspicious, progenitors of social disarray, deviant values, “criminal lifestyles” and personal disorganization.

Rapidly, proponents of the TC began to argue that clients were not so much socialized into deviant/criminal drug cultures, but that their drug use indexed a total lack of socialization. If rehabilitation was a process through which clients could be returned to a socialized (civilized) state, TCs increasingly argued that what clients needed was “habilitation” or “the development of a socially-productive, conventional lifestyle for the first time in their lives” (de Leon 1994, 19). Here, the rhetoric (and practice) of TCs drew heavily on racist and classist sociological representations of poor people of color, which slid from the “culture of poverty” to no culture at all. According to Scott: “to claim that some people were unsocialized — uncultured — was tantamount to asserting that they were outside the pale of civilization” (1997, 75). If “community as method” suggests that some (white, bourgeois, heteronormative) forms of sociality could be healing, it also cast the communities from which most Rising from the Ashes clients came as degraded and uncultured, and clients as bearing with them contaminants that the rehab would eviscerate. Thus, the therapeutic injunction of “community as method” required walling in, sheering off the “rehabilitative” community from its surroundings.

Drawing together these conceptual lineages — the architectures of the asylum and the prison, and treating the white heteronormative bourgeoisie as the paradigm of civilization — Rising from the Ashes policed its boundaries ideologically and materially. In order to maintain a “safe” environment for recovery, people in recovery were treated with suspicion, surveilled and searched, wanded for weapons and prodded for drugs every time they entered the building, mouths illuminated with flashlights to prevent “tongued” and “diverted” prescribed medications, and bedrooms tossed on a “random” schedule for contraband (which included food, cellphones, and cigarettes, in addition to alcohol and drugs). It was as though the “safe” environment of recovery had to be protected from the very people it was meant to protect. Yet, like all policing, these protocols could not deliver on their promises, for surveilling institutional boundaries and residents could not intervene in interpersonal harm within the space.

When I exited the elevator onto the 5th floor on a rainy February day, the first person I saw was Kimberly, in tears. A resident on the men’s floor directly below had been sexually harassing her, making vulgar remarks, “Let me fuck your fat ass, Ms. Piggy.” Facility staff were insistent on making this Kim’s problem. “There’s no proof,” said Michaela, the manager of the women’s floor, “it’s his word against yours,” even though, according to Kim, the facility manager, Mr. J was witness to one of the exchanges:

Many women — many people — who’ve been sexually assaulted respond by recoiling or hiding or feeling ashamed. Me, the way I experience my PTSD, is that I want to get you before you can get me. I get angry and confrontational. So I confronted him. And Mr. J? He told me to “knock it off” or get written up for fighting.

Several other men residents had also witnessed or participated in these incidents, but they defended the harasser, except Timothy:

But Michaela thinks that Timmy is only defending me because we’re having an unsanctioned relationship, “fraternizing,” which could get us both kicked out. So I’m talking to Michaela about filing a formal complaint, and she goes, ‘Well, we don’t want to delve too deep into this situation, otherwise the relationship between you and Tim might, you know, come up.’

Sticking fast to her right to safety, Kim nonetheless filed a formal complaint, with Timothy as a witness. In response, the facility put Kim’s harasser on a “separation contract,” which theoretically meant that he couldn’t have any contact with Kim. But in the wake of the contract, he was everywhere in the building, talking about her “fat ass” in the hallways to other residents loud enough for her to hear when she walked past and getting other men to give Kim “messages” on his behalf. Chaperoned walks were facility-wide, so Kim couldn’t go without encountering him. She couldn’t work out in the gym, because he could come find her there. She couldn’t go to the cafeteria, because other men had taken up his cat-calls. So Kim filed another formal complaint:

That was just this morning. And this time, Michaela said that all they could do was put in a ‘safety transfer’ to an all-women facility for me, ‘so that you won’t be sexually harassed anymore.’ But I’m not going. That will jeopardize my recovery. And I don’t understand why I should have to be punished when he’s the one harassing me. And anyway, I could be sexually harassed at a women’s facility — the problem isn’t gender, it’s behavior. They should make the behavior stop. This facility, I feel like it’s designed to protect and serve men, violent men, at all costs.

Tomorrow, I’m going to request mediation between me and him. Maybe he was hurt by a woman when he was a kid, maybe he has trauma from that. But while he’s getting the help he needs to understand that pain and heal from it, he needs to just close his mouth. It’s not that hard. Just stop saying the words. It’s not that hard.

The method of walling in people as “protection” is a transparently carceral spatial practice. To construe itself as “safe” by surveilling its borders and residents, its only solution to the violence Kim faced was more isolation and separation. For Kim, it wasn’t gender segregation that would keep her safe, but rather dismantling patriarchal behavior through which the resident was allowed unfettered, violent commentary on her body. Simultaneously, her attempt to understand her harasser as a trauma-survivor was a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between violence and trauma than the reductive politics of quarantine offered by the rehab. Kim’s experience revealed how — as degraded and sexually-suspect themselves (indexed by Michaela’s “fraternization” threat) — criminalized women who used drugs were treated as having no right to self-defense (Kaba 2014), perhaps, even, treated as the threat against which others are defended.

The impossibility of delivering true safety for Kim from within rehabilitation’s image of her already-defiled state offers a reconsideration of Candace’s description of the urban geography of rehabilitation began this section. Kim’s experience reveals the ambiguous presence of the “fricking chaperone,” who functioned to protect not the women, but “the environment” from the degrading and contagious presence of women who use drugs. In the patriarchal and white supremacist spatial order of the city, criminalized, dispossessed, and displaceable women move through urban space wrong, subjected to anti-Black, anti-poor, and anti-drug user/sex-worker protocols of policing (Solomon, 2022). In describing herself and the other women as a “bunch of misfit children,” Candace thus theorized the paradox of “patriarchal” state protection for women like her, whose Blackness, drug use, criminal convictions and working-class status threw her athwart white heteropatriarchal notions of vulnerable womanhood.

Positioned paradoxically as childlike and dangerous, uncultured and defiling, contaminated and contagious, the women in Rising from the Ashes were walled in and surveilled. Rising from the Ashes treated surveillance and community separation as both antidote to and border containing their disorder. Once contained within the isolated space of rehabilitation, women like Kimberly were perpetually stalked by the suspicion that they continued to bear with them the cause of their own degradation, and thus were unworthy of protection. The “walled-in” spatial imaginary of Rising from the Ashes could not grapple with safety as anything other than segregation — and when confronted with violence within its walls, could offer Kimberly nothing more than further displacement.

“I Came Here to Rest”: Sleeping against Therapy

As rehab’s walls normalized segregation, they also produced sensory deprivation. A routinized and orderly environment was treated as the foundation upon which women in Rising from the Ashes could practice and perfect the time-management and self-regulation thought to be essential to recovery from substance use. But if “order” and “routine” were meant to conjure placid scenes of “right living,” what they actually produced was unrelenting monotony. With groups only held sporadically, a computer lab “for job searches only” perpetually shuttered, a gym with only one working elliptical, and all but the longest-term clients prohibited from leaving the premises without an appointment; there just wasn’t very much to do in this “self-managed” program.

As Chanelle said, “how many relapse prevention worksheets can a girl do?” her purple crochet hook flashing between loops of baby yellow acrylic yarn spooling out a striped blanket cascading across her lap, down the loveseat on which she perched, to pool around her feet. We sat chatting in the dayroom over the low company of the television playing Real Housewives reruns, as we waited, without much hope, for a recovery group to commence that should have begun twenty minutes before. “They tell us ‘it works if you work it,’ but it doesn’t make any sense to ‘work a program’ that doesn’t even barely exist!” Eyes fixed on the television, Gigi nodded, “the court didn’t want to sentence me here because of that. My judge called it a ‘shelter for addicts,’ behind the fact that they don’t really do anything for us.” “I came here to rest,” said Jane, matter-of-factly, barely looking up from her library book as she spoke. “Yeah girl,” Chanelle affirmed, “it’s been a hard knock year; hell, a hard knock life. We all deserve some rest.”

Two months later, when the weather warmed and Jane had gotten her fill of rest, she checked herself out of the program “against medical advice” and went back to the street, under a bridge where she had long made a home. “This is her pattern,” her counselor confided in me, in whispered tones the day after Jane’s departure:

Every winter, when the weather gets bad, she comes in, gets clean, reads her little library books, follows the program to the letter. And then the weather turns, and she’s right back out to the streets and the bottle. She acts like everything is fine, like she’s making progress on her recovery, but underneath all that, she’s just a mess of trauma she won’t confront.

That rehab could offer a place to rest wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Working in harm reduction in the years before I began this project, I knew that rehab could offer a reprieve from difficult, criminalized life: a chance to sleep a full night in a bed, uninterrupted by cops, or eat warm meals, or re-set drug-use patterns that felt unmanageable, or attend to that problematic root canal. That people go to rehab to meet needs other than sobriety wasn’t a surprise. But something in the way this conversation unfolded revealed the subversive politics of claiming rest and sleep in the face of rehabilitation’s mandates to discipline as a mode for “overcoming trauma,” paradoxically routed through the daily routine of boredom.

Boredom and idleness were ongoing sources of frustration for the women, and play complex roles in how therapeutic-carceral institutions have conceptualized the “criminal” “disease” of addiction, from the early penitentiary forward. Although historically, idleness was conceptualized as “part cause and part symptom of deviant behavior,” (Rothman 1971, 103) forms of sensory deprivation — social and physical isolation, solitary confinement, silence, repetitive and alienated labor, bare cells, uniforms, regimentation, and submission to “orderly” institutional routines (Hirsch 1992, 14–15; Rothman 1971, 90–93) — were thought to destroy the somatic and affective bases of criminal idleness, to be replaced with virtuous hard work. In particular, pathological deviance was thought to be the result of “unnatural and artificial habits” and “luxury, self-indulgence, sensuality, and effeminacy … late hours spent in vulgar or graceful dissipation” (Rothman 1971, 124) — in other words, sensory overstimulation, to which bland institutional life was an anecdote.³ While idleness may explain why people get up to no good, boredom may just serve as partial cure. At Rising from the Ashes, the emptiness of rehab was meant to force women to strip back from the “sensory overstimulation” of drug use, so that they could confront themselves.

In therapist Agata’s “Positive Traits” group — in which the women were supposed to talk about things they liked about themselves — a conversation about being “balanced” quickly turned into a conversation about how in rehab, there’s nothing to do:

Donna: I had more balance when I was getting high. Cuz with every feeling now, I’m shifting left and right.

Lily: Yeah, I agree, but I think it has to do with the lack of routine here, lack of structure. Maybe it’s less about all those feelings flooding back and more about how there’s nowhere for them to go. There is nothing to do! When I was getting high, I was still working, and I had my kid. So you bet your ass no matter what I was getting up and getting my kid to school, picking him up from school, going to work in between. I only got high in private. I had a routine, a structure, my drug use fit into that. You bet your life I was balanced and responsible.

Gracie: Every day is just the same old shit here; the monotony could kill me. Sometimes I’m like, ‘no wonder you’re depressed, looking at these same damned grey walls every day of your life.’ I feel so disconnected from everything, like there’s nothing holding me down. Like you said, Lily. There’s nothing to keep us going, nothing to look forward to, no one we’re showing up for on the daily. I think that’s what you’re talking about, Donna — the sense of shifting, emotions rocking you back and forth, it’s because we’re not tied to anything in here. I know we’re supposed to be holding up that mirror to our own selves, but when we’re only looking at ourselves day in and day out, I don’t think that’s enough to keep us in it, you know?

Agata didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking, and she interrupted:

When you are highly functional in your addiction, you plan everything around using. It could be helpful to establish routine by rewarding yourself three times a day, like you used to schedule your day around drugs. You know, something to look forward to.

The incipient critique of isolation and boredom that Donna, Lily, and Gracie were building was shattered with Agata’s redirection overwriting their conversation and misplacing drugs at the center of these women’s lives before rehab, even as they themselves were detailing relations of self and time extending in a multitude of directions and through relationships that kept the women balanced. While Donna, Lily, and Gracie were commenting on how their lives outside felt meaningful, purposeful, and connected, Agata implied that because their industriousness was structured by the wrong object (drugs), it wasn’t really industrious at all, but rather a schedule of wasted time. Yet, neither Donna nor Lily nor Gracie were saying they scheduled their lives around drugs. They were saying that, in rehab, there wasn’t much to keep them going. Agata’s suggestion to “reward yourself three times a day, like you used to schedule your day around drugs” suggested that recovery-time is just something you endure.

Criminalized people who use drugs — like the women gathered on the dayroom’s haphazard couches talking about boredom — are asked to endure too much (not just boredom, but state violence, interpersonal violence, therapeutic violence, poverty, racism, sexism, and ableism) and to prove their worth by showing just how much they can overcome. Against this endurance — and against the monotony of rehab — what does it mean to take resistance to therapeutic reworking seriously? To hear, in Jane’s “I come here to rest” and Gracie’s “but when we’re only looking at ourselves day in and day out, I don’t think that’s enough to keep us in it” as challenges to recovery’s mandates of self-excavation and self-confrontation? What if, in the endless stretches of time that women were supposed to confront their “inner demons,” they rested instead?⁴

So, then, sleep. Tonya was the best sleeper on the floor. Almost six feet tall, ghostly pale with ice-blue eyes always ringed in thick eyeliner, dentures she preferred not to wear because they bothered her gums, hair scraped back into a tight, high ponytail trailing halfway down her back, and that gentle roll in her movements characteristic of methadone, Tonya woke up every night at 11, stayed awake through the 8:30 am check-in circle run by the women, and fell back asleep on the bus she took each morning to her methadone clinic. Back at Rising from the Ashes by 11, Tonya would change into her fluffy socks and cozy pajamas, and, riding her methadone doziness, go back to bed, not to be seen again until after lights out. In this way, Tonya rested her way through (or against) modules and groups, individual therapy, arts and crafts, group walks, meals — and woke up just in time for the freest interval in rehab: nighttime. And in the night, Tonya had fun. I never saw with my own eyes the delights she got up to in the night, but I’d hear tell in the morning — Tonya trying on new outfits in the bathroom at midnight; Tonya, pacing and singing to herself; Tonya, getting it on with a boy from the floor below; Tonya, waking up her roommate at 4am insisting now is the time to dye our hair; Tonya pulling her smuggled cell phone out of her bra and staging selfies in the hallway in front of those neon digital beachscape prints; Tonya crushing Tylenol and snorting it, just for fun. Availing herself of the darkness, Tanya’s nightly movements gesture toward what the “cover of night” offers for criminalized people and other fugitives, whose movements and desires are circumscribed and institutionally prohibited. After lights out, with a skeleton crew of staff who mostly dozed themselves, fissures emerged between zones of surveillance, where more could happen than what was permitted in daylight. Tonya’s furtive movements shattered the enforced idleness and monotony of rehab as she produced spaces of play.

“Signs of Entitlement”: Aesthetics Against Rehabilitation

Dawn: Back in the day, when you first went in, for the first 30 days, women couldn’t wear no makeup. You couldn’t iron your clothes. I felt like that was because, like, you know, if you dress up the outside, you’ll feel better, but it’s not about the outside, it’s about the inside. I had to wear a stocking cap when I got in trouble to hide all my hair, I had to wear a dunce cap, I had to wear signs when I, you know, did something. The big signs, they were called SoEs: Signs of Entitlement. You could get one for anything — basically anything you did that made you stand out, or break the rules or if you were, you know, acting like you were better than just a junky, like you had pride.

Kaitlyn: The last program I was in, upstate, there were all these rules. You couldn’t wear sneakers, you had to, kinda, dress up in a way they thought was appropriate. They were trying to make you live a certain way. I went back to jail basically because I got my nose pierced [which was against the rules] and I did a year in jail. They [the court] said, you can go to another eight month program, after I had already completed an 8-month program, and I said no. So I took the year cuz that was my fifth program by then and I said, ‘I’m done.’

Nadja: A year for having your nose pierced? I don’t understand what that has to do with recovery. Dawn, I hear what you’re saying, healing is about the inside, but it also seems to me that preventing people from wearing makeup if they want, or sneakers, or whatever, is a way of humiliating people…

Dawn: Yeah, it’s both, it’s both. I mean, they took it to the extent where — and they still do this, I know this because Dierdre was there recently — they come around with a tissue and make sure you have no makeup on your face…Look at Nadja’s face! [laughing]

Nadja: No, I’m just shocked, cuz like, I think when I’m feeling down on myself, and I go get a haircut…

Chorus of crosstalk: You feel better! It makes you feel better!

Quelle: Makeup isn’t about vanity for me. I feel fine without makeup if I’m just hanging out, but I feel like my whole self-identity would be gone if someone were to take that away from me. You know, it’s nothing to do with ‘I’m attracting men,’ or anything like that, it’s just like, feeling like myself.

Regina: I remember, I had to get like a special ‘beauty therapy’ pass to get my hair and nails done, because it was something that me and my daughters did together … and it was a whole big case-conference, they was like no, you can’t do that. I sat down and wrote a grievance, I said, this is conducive to my treatment. These are the things I started doing before I was getting high, I want to return to a sense of normalcy. They rejected that whole thing. You know, I left. I didn’t see any benefit in you getting in my face and screaming at me and wagging your finger and putting me on a chair. I am not in kindergarten. We don’t do the timeout in the corner with the dunce cap and all that.

Here, “signs of entitlement” indexes punitive practices beyond the wearing of literal signs (although that was part of the rehabilitative apparatus as well), to the range of disciplinary procedures intended to convince women in rehab that personhood and self-expression were something they had to earn. These coerced rituals of bodily mortification were a punitive patriarchal pedagogy, teaching that the bodies, aesthetics and adornments of especially working class and nonwhite femininity were superficial and distracting from the “inner work” of therapeutic confrontation, which required submitting the body to discipline that the mind may be transformed. In dismissively narrating bodily adornment as “vanity,” styling oneself was reframed as a debased, disordered, and misdirected desire — in other words, a sort of addiction (a disorder of desire). This patriarchal pedagogy instructed women that since they had debased themselves through participation in “drug and criminal lifestyles,” adornment was a privilege they had given up.

But Channelle, with her flat-ironed and loosely braided hair, carefully-styled one-shoulder t-shirts, artfully ripped jeans, and Nike high-tops; Dejah with her chunky braids trailing all the way to the top of her low-rise pink velour sweatpants and matching Uggs; Stacy with her heavily-drawn cat-eye eyeliner, messy Amy Winehouse beehive and Hot Topic goth-girl sweatshirts; Charlene with her Bob Marley T-shirts and wooden earrings in the shape of Africa; Pamela with her push-up bras, teeny tank tops, eye-wateringly-tight ponytail and jet black hairpiece sparkling with static halfway down her back; Kim with her pale pink nails perfectly shaped and matching her eyeshadow; or Dani with her working-class Long Island butch asymmetrical cropped hair, polo shirts, khakis, and sensible sneakers pushed back against the institution’s sense that working class women’s aesthetics were evidence of disorder and criminality. Where so much bodily autonomy was denied, clothing was a way to express commitments and identifications to a life outside of rehab, expressive repertoires exceeding taupe institutional mandates, and desires for bodily integrity.

In between themselves (out of the earshot of therapists), many of the women valued connectedness and solidarity, not only to each other, but to the places and people they had come from. As the exchange with Agata reveals, it wasn’t always possible for women in Rising from the Ashes to refute therapeutically the isolationist logic of rehab, when their speaking was rerouted into therapeutic platitudes. Yet, they found other ways to embody and adorn space that were a subversive refutation across multiple registers of therapeutic ideology. They found ways to rework what it meant to be in community: not as surveillance and confrontation, but as care and connectedness.

The grey walls surrounding Gracie’s steel bed and locker for personal possessions were covered, to the inch, with photographs, letters, and drawings from her husband. The photographs were of her young son, Joey, pale face and bright blue eyes surrounded by curly blond ringlets — sometimes alone, sometimes with her and her husband — spanning five years from his birth to her last supervised visit. Even though the letters and drawings were also grey (pencil on white paper), they were lively and warm, in contradistinction to the walls and steel furniture they concealed. “He started drawing in prison,” Gracie explained, as she pointed to the earliest drawing on the wall, of Minnie Mouse surrounded by a delicately-shaded corona of roses woven with thorns. “He says that every time he thinks of me and Joey, he draw us something, so that we know he’s thinking of us. Almost every day now, I get something. This one” — and she pointed to a portrait of Joey as an infant, eyes squinted up in delight — “was done by a guy on his tier. My husband is learning how to do portraits from him.” She delicately lifted a drawing of a skull-and-rose tableau illustrated in instantly-recognizable jailhouse style, handing it to me with pride. “He says together we’re like the roses, making something beautiful out of it all.” These material artifacts held them close to each other in ongoing relation, reminding Gracie of who she was living with and for. As Fleetwood argues, “Art creates relational possibilities that disrupt the mandate of the prison — which include isolation, the burden of time, [and] the disruption of family life and social relations” (2020, 25). Living in and through “various states of un/freedom” through which Gracie and her husband were severed from each other and from their child, Gracie attempted to bring her family near by adorning the walls of her bedroom in their images.

“Recovery for me means a world where my daughters won’t be punished for being Black, for being women, a world where they are secure,” Charlene explained to me, as the diffuser gently filled the air with a delicate sea-breeze aroma and Bob Marley smiled down on us from a sarong tacked to the wall above her bed. Charlene had decorated the narrow nook in which her bed was set with photographs, inspirational sayings, and the small objects that bound her to her healing: fairy lights for joy, smooth stones for meditation, and pictures of her girls snuggled and swaddled in brightly colored caps, pale pink onesies, and blankets crocheted by their great-aunts. Feeling connected to African diasporic cultural production — from the Bob Marley sarong to the greeting cards celebrating Black womanhood tacked near where she laid her head — allowed Charlene to envision a world without racist-sexist violence, a world in which her daughters would not be harmed in the ways that she had been. For Charlene, recovery was no individual matter; it was interdependent with her children’s wellbeing and the end of anti-Black racism and patriarchal oppression. While in a prior era of Rising from the Ashes, Charlene would have been punished with a “sign of entitlement,” as the decorations violated rehabilitation’s injunctions to sensory deprivation, dullness, and sameness, her aesthetic practices were a way she signified her entitlement to a world without violence. This vision of recovery — proliferated by Charlene’s decorations — was rooted not in some pastoral wonderland, but in a social world woven by the abolition of white supremacy.

Against the rehabilitative vision in which personal aesthetics and affinities were a distraction, and isolation and boredom were the routes to self-actualized “recovery,” Gracie’s and Charlene’s bedroom décor, in different ways, pointed outward towards the communities of care and kinship that gave their lives meaning. The material artifacts adorning their respective bedrooms represented their ongoing struggles to claim kinship and connectedness in the face of rehabilitation’s attempt to sever them from their families, communities, and alternative futures. If the vision of family proffered by rehabilitation to Gracie as a white, working class woman from Long Island insisted that she hold herself at a “proper” distance from criminalized others and redeem her white feminine innocence through displays of virtuous, sober comportment and a turn inward toward the self-contained domestic unit, her choice to surround herself in prison art signified a form of outlaw kinship: as though to express that her people and family are found and represented there, too. In turn, their representations of her family and history brought to vibrant immediacy that which rehab’s walls sought to sever and repress. For Charlene, connecting to a future for her daughters required representations of global Blackness and Black womanhood as beautiful and revolutionary — an expansive vision of Black life exceeding the racist, sexist violence to which she had been subjected her whole life (in her words, punished for being Black and a woman). And it was this expansiveness — her sense that structural violence could, through struggle, be overcome, that rooted her future vision of family life. Thus, for both Gracie and Charlene, connection to communities outside Rising from the Ashes sustained their senses that the world had otherwise to offer them than the stark grey walls and isolation of rehab.

Conclusion: Pushing Back the Walls

In my last month of research at Rising from the Ashes, I stayed late one evening to watch a talent show. It was nearly 10pm when the performances got underway; it couldn’t start until all the residents who worked cleanup in the kitchen were finished and everyone who went to the local 8pm Alcoholics Anonymous meeting had returned. After we had all assembled and chanted her name for what felt like eternity, Dejah, our MC for the night, strode down the middle of the cafeteria in her hot pink track suit and matching shoes and took the mic to riotous applause. For the next two hours, poetry, lip syncing, singing, rapping, and stand-up routines swelled to fill the space. No one was more central to our experience than Dejah, who wove a powerful collective sociality out of these disparate performances, deftly coaxing, teasing, and loving up on the variously shy or boisterous, loud or quiet, popular or lonely, residents. A different sort of space took shape under Dejah’s hosting, as she helped us suspend or push back (if just for the evening) the architectures of isolation, deprivation, and criminalization through which rehabilitation came to exist and to which it continued to give form.

The unrelenting violence of prisons and jails, coupled with reformism’s capacity to co-opt and redirect abolitionist demands towards prison preservationist ends, can sometimes converge to encourage anti-carceral movements to endorse the supposed “lesser violence” of other forms of state control, such as court-coerced drug treatment. In New York City and elsewhere, this convergence has taken the form of proposals to construct “therapeutic,” “trauma-informed” jails and expand so-called “problem solving” courts and “alternatives to incarceration” programs (MOCJ, 2019). But reformist projects to ameliorate (rather than abolish) racist, capitalist, and cis-heteropatriarchal state violence often redistribute its institutional locations and effects, as Hwang notes in their theorization of “carceral care”: “carceral care is not simply the deterrence, reduction, or interruption of carceral violence; rather, it is a mode of tracing how the penal administration of care multiples the very scales, technologies, and cultural structures of violence itself” (2019, 559). During my research, this redistribution of state violence revealed itself in myriad ways: in how no court-coerced clients ultimately escape carceral capture (after all, to be “diverted” into rehab, one must be arrested, arraigned, often jailed, plead guilty, make court appearances, submit to drug tests, endure ACS investigations, and risk jail at the whim of a drug court judge); to the punitive architectures of surveillance, suspicion, quarantine, isolation, and boredom to which residents were subjected while in rehab; and in the theories of disordered, unculturated personality that the rehabilitative regime shares with the penitentiary and asylum and clings to in its attempts to break poor, drug using women of their “disorderly” modes of being.

If the spaces, practices, and ideologies of rehabilitation intertwined to construe women who use drugs as not only contaminated and contaminating, but as constituted by disordered desires — not just for drugs, but for rest, beauty, and community, the spatial and aesthetic practices of the women encountered in this article point us elsewhere, to visions of healing grounded in fulfillment, interdependence, and connectedness. While a certain vision of participatory design might demand that paying attention to the spatial practices of women in rehab means involving criminalized women who use drugs in the planning, design, and implementation of “better” institutions of rehabilitation-cum-confinement (cf. Van Alen Institute, 2017), attunement to the specific practices documented here point elsewhere: to the necessity of the abolition of rehabilitation and its architectures of deprivation, isolation, surveillance, community separation, and punishment. From Tonya’s nighttime delights to Jane’s need for rest to Gracie’s and Charlene’s bricolage patterning over the drab institutional grey to weave family and community close, women coerced into residential drug treatment at Rising from the Ashes resisted therapeutic mandates toward isolation, sensory deprivation, and endurance, and point us towards the centrality of desire — for self, for community, for healing, for beauty (Cf. Hartman 2019) — in charting a course away from the carceral geographies and practices currently holding sway over the lives of criminalized women who use drugs.

Biography

Nadja is a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University and received their Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2022. Focusing on the experiences of trans and cis working class women, primarily women of color, who use drugs, their work exposes how liberal imaginaries of rehabilitation actually function to extend carceral punishment under new, “gender-responsive,” “therapeutic” guise. They are the author of “A Trans Way of Seeing,” co-authored with Kitty Jayne Rotolo (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2022).